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An unexpected load test

A few days ago, there was a post on /r/Minecraft. Someone put up a 1.4GB world file. It was a scale model of the Earth. It got more popular than they expected, and they hit bandwidth limits on free sites, so I offered to host it for them, with no limitations. It peaked somewhere around 85 downloads. Although my internet upload was saturated, I didn’t really mind. By the next morning, I was down to only 5 or 6 concurrent downloads(I keep a window open on one of my screens that checks every 2 seconds). I thought my 5 seconds of fame were over.

But then the concurrent connections count started rising again. Within a minute it was back up to 20, then 30, then 40. I was extremely baffled, so I thought to google the link to the file on my server. It led to the description of a youtube video, which had been posted 15 minutes ago by this point. I checked and he had just over a million subscribers! The download count kept rising, up to 118 concurrent downloads.

I didn’t mind, but there were a few problems. First of all, I didn’t want the file hotlinked, so I set up a rewrite rule(301) to redirect from the file(Which was hotlinked on a different domain, a website purely dedicated to silly things my math teacher says) to a page on my blog, with a link to the file in the post. It was a pretty short post, the youtuber was french so I didn’t want to hide the download link too much. I had that fixed in a few minutes, but I still had another problem.

The server was taking 4-5 seconds to load the math teacher site, which was purely static HTML and an image, and was timing out to reach my blog(WordPress + https). The CPU and RAM of the web server weren’t anywhere near maxed. It turns out the problem was in apache’s config: “MaxClients” was set to its default of 150. I increased it to 500, and immediately, load times went away, and everything was back to normal. Apache2 peaked around 180 processes, if I remember correctly.

This was all yesterday. It seems to have died down now. I made a dollar from adsense for all my hard work. c: (Kidding of course, it was a lot of fun for me, especially having my homelab being used by so many people, and I’d gladly do it again!)

2 thoughts on “An unexpected load test”

much appreciate your homelab’s functioning, and my kids will go nuts exploring it. Totally inspired to have the Makerspace make your version of the Betavoltaic cell too.. nice project and improvements.